I'm so pleased to have Fess Parker on the cover of the Born on a Mountaintop paperback, because he was such a huge part of Crockett's astonishing afterlife. John Wayne, Billy Bob Thornton and a lot of other terrific actors have done their part to keep the legend fresh. But to a high percentage of Crockett's 20th- and 21st-century fans, Parker IS Davy. It didn't have to be that way, however. Walt Disney had toyed with the idea of putting Davy Crockett onscreen as early as 1946, when he got the painter Thomas Hart Benton to do a rough outline for an animated Crockett operetta. We don't know much about this brief collaboration, which never got any traction, but the end product would have looked more like Fantasiathan the 3-part TV series Disney finally launched in 1954. Parker was hardly a lock to win the starring role. At the time, he was one of thousands of Hollywood wannabes living from bit part to bit part. "I didn't miss a meal and I didn't sleep in the rain," he once recalled, but he did live in a toolshed for more than a year, and he couldn't afford a social life. Then he got a day's work on a science fiction movie called Them!, playing a man who's been committed to a mental ward because no one will believe his story about giant flying ants. Disney and his team had considered a lot of possible Crocketts -- among them Sterling Hayden, George Montgomery and Buddy Ebsen -- and eventually the search turned to a big-shouldered young actor named James Arness, later of Gunsmoke fame. Arness had starred as a G-man in Them! Studio legend has Uncle Walt watching the film, taking one look at Fess Parker, and exclaiming "That's our Davy Crockett!" What would have happened if Disney had been distracted during the time Parker was onscreen? "If Walt had taken a phone call or lit a cigarette or sneezed," he told an interviewer nearly half a century later, "I wouldn't be talking to you today."

What's the portrait of the silver-haired man with the clerical collar doing on the wall of the Crockett Cabin Museum in Rutherford, Tennessee -- the last town the King of the Wild Frontier called home? It's a great story, which I learned from Rutherford's leading Crockettologist, Joe Bone. You can find it beginning on page 253 of Born on a Mountaintop, or you can read a condensed version below. But if you're anywhere near Rutherford the second week of October, the best thing would be to check out the town's annual Davy Crockett Days celebration -- which features a street dance, a play called "Davy Crockett: Titan of Tennessee," a grand parade, and bluegrass on the porch of the Crockett Cabin -- and ask Joe to tell you the tale himself. Crockett lived in or around Rutherford from 1822 until the fall of 1835, including the three terms he served as a congressman. It was from there that he rode off to explore a new frontier and ended up fighting in the Texas Revolution. Joe Bone showed me his likely route out of town and the gravestone of one of his companions, L.K. Tinkle, who'd headed home before the Alamo happened. He also showed me the site of the long-neglected grave where Crockett's mother, Rebecca Hawkins Crockett, was originally buried.

And he explained how -- thanks to Walt Disney, Fess Parker and the 1950s Crockett Craze -- her remains came to be moved to the yard of the newly constructed Crockett Cabin Museum. It seems that a historically minded local woman named Mrs. Grover Reid had found herself on Queen for a Day, the old radio and TV show on which women vied with each other to tell the most pathetic tales of woe. Whoever got the loudest applause became queen and got a wish she had stated in advance, which could be anything from medical care to a new washing machine. Mrs. Reid's request was a bit unusual: She asked for "a tombstone for Davy Crockett's mother's grave." She didn't win. But a priest from Fall River, Massachusetts had tuned in that day, and he was moved to telephone the show. "You tell that nice lady that I will provide the money for Mrs. Crockett," Father John J. Casey said, and he did -- which is why his portrait hangs next to the bearskin on the cabin wall today. One more cabin photo to end with. It's of Joe showing off a painting of the cabin by a local art teacher. If you look really hard, you can see a smiling Davy hidden in the trees.

Fans of Walt Disney's Davy Crockett may or may not recognize this cabin, which has been updated a bit since September 8, 1954, when filming of "Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter" began in western North Carolina. Located on land retained (amazingly) by the Eastern Band of Cherokees after most of the tribe had been forced west on the Trail of Tears, the cabin served as the exterior of Davy and Polly's home. While researching Born on a Mountaintop, I spent several days tracking down Crockett sites in the area and talking to people who'd had small parts in the Disney production. "I was in the scene where they had the shooting match for the cow," said Ken Blankenship, now director of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, who was in 7th grade at the time. Bob Blankenship, Ken's brother, worked in the motel where the Disney cast and crew were staying; he recalled Fess Parker teaching him a few chords on the guitar. Tom Beck, also an extra in the film, remembered coming home one day to find the actor playing Chief Red Stick "laid out on our front porch" because he'd forgotten to duck in a scene where Davy throws a hatchet at him. Speaking of not ducking: One man I wish I could have talked to was Richard "Geet" Crowe, a talented Cherokee craftsman and actor who died in 2002. It was Parker who forgot to duck this time, in the story I'd heard, and got zapped by a rubber-tipped arrow as a result. Crowe's daughter confirmed the tale, and I later found an interview in which Parker reminisced about it. Richard Crowe played "an Indian sentinel standing duty on a bank twenty feet above the river," Parker said. "The camera was shooting from behind my right shoulder and I was to spot the Indian and fire just as he drew a bead on me with his bow and arrow. Then, my bullet was supposed to hit him and knock him off the small cliff." But there were a couple of flaws in this carefully planned scenario: Parker's gun produced enough smoke to cloud his vision, and Crowe's aim -- as he fell and released his arrow -- was true. "It his me smack in the forehead right above my left eye," Parker said, "and as things went black for a few seconds, I though to myself, 'Well, this is one Davy Crockett who's never going to get to the Alamo.'"

I was looking for an image of David Crockett to post on his 227th birthday, and ran across this detail from a mural in the Franklin County Library, in Winchester, Tennessee. Winchester is ten miles northeast of the frontier neighborhood where David and Polly Crockett were living in the summer of 1813, just before David volunteered to fight in the Creek War. This David's features are borrowed from portraits made during his political career (the only images from life we have), but the muralist has given him a young man's face. You can imagine him setting out to serve under General Andrew Jackson against the Creeks. Or you can imagine him -- as I did -- as a frontier hunter, heading out in search of game to feed his family. He was a much better hunter than farmer, but he had to work some rented acres just the same. Tradition in the Bean's Creek neighborhood holds that, if you know the right place to look, you can walk out into the middle of a field and see a well that David Crockett dug 200 years ago. When I was reporting Born on a Mountaintop, I got to do just that. My guide was a local man named Jim Hargrove, who had retired in a spot just a few hundred yards from the well. Its square concrete top, Jim told me, was added long after Crockett's time. But when I peered down into the well itself, it looked suitably old.

Hargrove, as it happened, helped take care of another important Crockett site in the neighborhood -- one that puts a bittersweet edge, in hindsight, on that last, pre-war summer that David, Polly and their two young boys shared in Tennessee. David signed up to fight Indians in September 1813. Polly pleaded not to be left alone, but he felt he had to serve. He was home a few months later, his enlistment up, but before long he enlisted again. The Creek War was over, but the War of 1812 was still going on, and, as Crockett would explain years later in his autobiography, "I wanted a small taste of British fighting." Once again, Polly protested, and once again, her restless husband ignored her. "I always had a way of just going ahead, at whatever I had a mind to," he wrote, with commendable honesty but little apparent remorse. Within a few months of his return home -- the chronology gets a little murky here -- David had a third child and Polly was dead. It's not known what killed her, but one of the many possibilities, or perhaps a complicating factor, was simple malnutrition. Bean's Creek tradition reinforces this possibility. When David was off fighting, Hargrove told me, Polly and the children didn't have enough to eat, and they'd have had even less if a Cherokee man who lived nearby hadn't shared some of his own food. She's buried in what's now known as the Polly Crockett Cemetery, high on a ridge a mile or so east of David Crockett's well. A grove of trees gives the place an isolated feel, as though it were its own private hilltop. A good number of Jim Hargrove's mother's relatives are there as well.

Some people you don't forget, even if you barely knew them. Kevin R. Young, who died a year ago today, is one of those people for me. I met Kevin in San Antonio in March of 2011, during the weekend-long celebration of the 175th anniversary of the Alamo. One afternoon I squeezed into a small car with him and three other new acquaintances who cared deeply about the Alamo, heading for the Odd Fellows Cemetery on Powder House Hill. (It's a long story, but some of the ashes of the defenders -- just possibly including David Crockett's -- ended up there.) The photo shows Kevin standing next to a historical marker commemorating the "Lost Burial Place of the Alamo Defenders." No, he couldn't tell me whether Crockett's remains really were on Powder House Hill. But I soon realized that Kevin Young knew pretty much everything else about Texas history -- and had a sense of humor about it, too. I won't try to replicate that humor, except to say that I soon found myself referring to the Battle of Lexington as "the Gonzales of Massachusetts." But I will say that Kevin -- who spent much of his life as a historical interpreter and researcher, at Goliad's Presidio La Bahia among other places -- was incredibly generous with his knowledge. He sent me old maps, dug out unpublished documents from his files, and cheerfully answered as many Alamo questions as I tossed his way. Over the years, I've since learned, he did the same for many, many others. After Kevin died suddenly last spring, his friend Lee Spencer White organized a San Antonio memorial service for him; it took place on Powder House Hill. Lee also wrote a moving remembrance of Kevin in the Alamo Studies Review; you can find a link to it here.

The King of the Wild Frontier's immortal sidekick would have been 105 today. The photo at left, according to Wikipedia, shows Buddy Ebsen sometime around 1936. Ebsen was a candidate to play Davy Crockett in Walt Disney's TV series, but ended up playing Georgie Russel instead. It's a great part, not least because screenwriter Tom Blackburn turned Georgie into Davy's unofficial publicist as a way of showing how frontier legends got created. My favorite Ebsen story is one that Fess Parker told in an interview for the Archive of American Television. The two were on tour in Texas during the height of the 1955 Crockett craze when they were abruptly whisked away from an appearance and told they were going to address the Texas Legislature. Not knowing quite what to say or do, Parker ended up singing "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" a cappella. When he got to the chorus, he recalled, "Buddy joined in. And if we weren't friends before, we were friends forever after that."

We don't often hear Davy Crockett and Ludwig van Beethoven mentioned in the same breath. Or at least I hadn't. Classical music, in fact, was pretty much the last thing on my mind on March 26, 2010, as I headed for Crockett country to begin reporting Born on a Mountaintop. Then I happened upon a radio station that was playing Beethoven's Second Symphony, and it suddenly hit me that the legendary American frontiersman and the immortal German composer were contemporaries. They shared the planet for 41 years. March 26, I soon learned, was the anniversary of Beethoven's death in 1827. That was the year David Crockett -- who was born in 1786 -- began his first term in Congress. It's not easy to think of them having much else in common, but let's give it a try. * Beethoven was responsible for some of the most beautiful music ever written for strings. Crockett is said to have entertained his fellow Alamo defenders by playing the fiddle, though it's far from certain that he played the instrument at all. * Beethoven had a thing for Napoleon, initially titling his Third Symphony the Bonaparte, though he soon had second thoughts about the name. Crockett met his end at the hands of the Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who liked to call himself "the Napoleon of the West." * "Throughout his life," wrote Beethoven biographer Edmund Morris, the composer"struggled against epic

odds and prevailed with enormous courage." You could say the same about Crockett's lifelong struggle and his courage, whether or not you think he prevailed. And then, of course, there's the Peanuts connection. At the height of the Walt-Disney-and-Fess-Parker-inspired Crockett craze of 1955, cartoonist Charles Schulz produced a wonderful run of strips in which Charlie Brown (always in a coonskin cap) debates the Beethoven-obsessed Shroeder about whose hero is biggest and best. You can read some of these strips in John Harris's blog Roasted Peanuts -- which I highly recommend; there are more here -- but let me give you a bit of dialogue to whet your appetite: Shroeder: "BEETHOVEN COULD DO ANYTHING DAVY CROCKETT COULD DO!" Charlie Brown: "OH YEAH? DID HE KILL A BEAR WHEN HE WAS ONLY THREE?!! DID HE? HUH? DID HE?!" Schroeder: "BEETHOVEN KILLED TWELVE BEARS WHEN HE WAS ONLY THREE." How do you top an argument like that? Beats me, and it beat Charlie Brown, too. The strip ends with him just standing there, clutching a rifle that's at least twice as long as he is tall, giving his triumphant opponent the final word. "IT'S A LITTLE KNOWN FACT OF AMERICAN HISTORY!" Shroeder says.

When people ask me how I came to write a book about Davy Crockett, I tell them it's because my elder daughter fell in love with Davy when when she was 4 years old. This explanation is perfectly true, but it leaves out one complicating fact – which is that Lizzie fell in love with Andy Jackson at the same time. For what seemed like a full year, she greeted visiting friends and relatives with the charmingly out-of-nowhere question: “Do you know who my favorite president is?” Not many people answered correctly. And really, how could anyone have guessed? Old Hickory was not a lovable man, though by most definitions he was a great one. The real David Crockett loathed his fellow Tennessean, whom he saw as an autocratic threat to democracy. And if you're looking to eliminate Jackson from your short list of cuddly presidents, all you have to do is think “Indian Removal” and “Trail of Tears.” Ah, but it was the historical Andrew Jackson who forced the Cherokees to make that brutal, deadly trek west. The man Lizzie loved was someone else entirely. As portrayed in Crockett legend – especially in a 1944 book for young readers by Irwin Shapiro, with wonderful illustrations by James Daugherty – Jackson was a mythic creature who was pals with the mythic Davy we had come to know. The starting point for Yankee Thunder: The Legendary Life of Davy Crockett was the “collection of tales, anecdotes, and plain and fancy whoppers” that appeared in Crockett almanacs for decades after Davy's death. But as Shapiro notes in his introduction, he improved on the almanac stories in a number of ways. He eliminated “coarse, even brutal” parts that were “not consonant with the large outlines of Davy's character”; arranged the stories in a coherent narrative; and inserted “General Old Hickory Andy Jackson” as a major character.

Andy and Davy meet up during the Indian wars, and pretty soon they're arguing about which one should be president. “We're the best two men for it in these here United States,” Andy says, “and it's up to one o' us to take the office.” He wants Davy to run. Davy thinks Andy should do it. A shooting match with a surprise ending eventually settles the issue, and the next time the friends see each other, they're in Washington City, celebrating Andy's inauguration: Andy Jackson cut loose with a regular wildcat screech. Davy came back with a horse neigh, and they circled round each other, flapping their arms and crowing like roosters. Then they both busted out laughing and thumped each other on the back. “Why, you ol' slangwhanger!” said Andy Jackson.

“You ol' bushwhacker, you!” said Davy. “You backwoods galumpus!” … “You screechin' wildcat!” ... “You ring-tailed roarer!” … “You red-headed alligator!”No further differences between them are mentioned, and pretty soon they're teaming up to defeat an embodiment of anti-democratic evil named Slickerty Sam. With Andy clearly established as Lizzie's favorite president, her sister needed one of her own. Exhibiting excellent historical judgment, Mona picked out a tall fellow named Abe. At some point, the girls' mother and I began to make up stories about two sisters who could step into a magic cardboard box and be transported to various points in the past. There, they would have fantastic adventures – or at least as fantastic as two chronically exhausted parents could make them – with their good friends Davy, Andy and Abe. Cute, you may say, but why am I bringing this up? The answer is that, after spending three years on a book about Crockett, I've got a better idea of what my family was doing with Andy, Davy and Abe. It's the same thing people have done with Crockett's story for almost two centuries now, and it's a human instinct more powerful than any pure quest for historical facts: We were turning real lives into myths that met our immediate needs.

When set out to write about Davy Crockett, I wasn't thinking of myself as someone with Texas roots. I was born in Seattle, Washington, and raised in New England, and while I'd driven across the state a few times on my way to and from California, I'd barely taken my foot off the gas. Sure, I knew that my grandmother had grown up in Texas, but she'd spent most of her adult life in Seattle, and that's where I've always pictured her. About a year into researching Born on a Mountaintop, however, I was digging around in a box of old family documents (for unrelated reasons) and came across a brown envelope with an inscription in her handwriting. "The Alamo, Texas, Sept. 1915," it read. "Taken on our wedding journey." In the envelope was the negative of the photo shown above. It was an eerie moment for a non-Texan deeply immersed in the Alamo story, and I was full of unanswerable questions. Did my grandparents get to see the inside of the church, and if so, who showed them around? Did they perhaps stay at the Hotel Bowie, a sign for which is visible in the background? How much did they know about the men who defended the battered old mission on the morning of March 6, 1836 -- and in particular, about the bear-hunting former Tennessee congressman who fought and died there? Here are a few things I do know: My grandmother, Julia Bell Shands, was born in Forney (20 miles or so east of Dallas) in 1884. The family eventually moved to San Marcos, where she went to college. She and my Minnesota-born grandfather, William Francis Thompson, met in 1914 in Palo Alto, California, where she was getting a masters degree and he was launching a fisheries biology career. They were married in San Marcos, and less than ten months after their Alamo honeymoon, my father was born.

David Crockett and his fellow Alamo defenders spent most of the siege hoping in vain for reinforcements. But in the early morning hours of March 1, 1836, a few brave men from Gonzales did make their way into the old mission. "It was only a reinforcement of thirty-two," as James Donovan writes in The Blood of Heroes, but "they told of more on their way, riding to Gonzales from all points. If those reinforcements arrived before the rest of the Mexican Army, the rebels might have a fighting chance." History records "the immortal thirty-two" as including a young man named Jonathan Lindley. And one of the first people I ran into, as I was setting out to report Born on a Mountaintop, turned out to be a relative of his. Dave Lindley and his wife, Joyce, were touring Tennessee's Davy Crockett Birthplace State Park when I arrived to do the same. Despite a longstanding interest in history, Dave hadn't known he had an Alamo connection until a friend came back from San Antonio and said, "Hey, there's a Lindley on the wall!" Jonathan Lindley, Joyce explained, turned out to be cousin of Dave's "third or fourth great grandfather." He had gone to Texas, as so many did, in search of opportunity and land; the Lindleys believe he was manning a cannon in the Alamo church when the Mexicans broke through. I thought of Dave and Joyce when my Crockett road trip finally took me to to San Antonio. I was

admiring the statue of Crockett that's part of the Cenotaph in Alamo Plaza when I looked down and saw a familiar name. You can find it in the somewhat murky photo above, but here's a close-up.

When I'd asked Dave Lindley about Crockett himself, he'd had some thoughtful things to say. Having read up on "the real man, as opposed to the Disney character," he wasn't inclined to overglorify him. "The real man made a lot of mistakes, like most humans do," Dave said, "so putting him on a pedestal, to me, is not a proper place." I couldn't agree more about Crockett being human. His human flaws and human emotions, I think, only make his story more interesting. But it's equally true that Americans put him on a pedestal long ago, for reasons that are just as fascinating as the facts of the real man's life. Here's just one: We humans need stories that give us hope, and courage in the face of darkness. And to that end, the stories of the famous Davy Crockett and the anonymous Jonathan Lindley both serve.

Author

Bob Thompson spent 24 years as a writer and editor at the Washington Post, where he often wrote about the intersection of history and myth. Born on a Mountaintop is his first book. As he explains in chapter one, it never would have been written if his beloved daughters hadn't been introduced to "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" at an impressionable age.